


Give and Take

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 20:21:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: High school AU. The brothers at home during the lazy days of summer vacation, tiptoeing their way into what they've always wanted.





	Give and Take

Tired of all the food left out to spoil, the fights with schoolmates, the backtalk, and the furniture smashed in tantrums, Odin sends Thor to stay with Laufey, a distant cousin, for the summer after eighth grade. Laufey has a farm and can always use the help. Loki spends that summer cooped up in the house reading, as he is not allowed to use the swimming pool alone, and without Thor there to make a game of it, being outside is just bugs, sweat, and sunburn with no upside.

Thor is a polite and quiet shadow of himself come September. He seems cheerful enough around other people, their parents included, but when it’s only Loki, Thor drops the smile.

“You should sulk in front of him,” Loki says, sitting down beside Thor on the living room sofa, tossing his arm behind his brother’s shoulders and twirling blond hair around his fingers. “Maybe he won’t send you to the farm again next summer.”

“Sorry,” Thor says, shaking himself. “Didn’t mean to sulk.” And he smooths his features and pulls the corners of his mouth up pleasantly. It's the mask he wears all through school and dinner.

“Don’t,” Loki says.

Thor raises his eyebrows, drops his face, and goes back to reading about vitamin deficiencies.

He returns to the farm willingly the following summer.

With Loki a freshman and Thor a sophomore, they get to see each other in the halls during the school day. Loki grins when he sees his brother coming and Thor grimaces as he watches Loki go.

In the spring, Loki grills Thor about his summer plans as they ride home together with the windows down. Their hair floats and flutters around their heads, catching on the wet skin of their lips as they speak. Thor still wants to work at Laufey’s farm, saying it will lighten the load for Laufey’s sons and that it makes him feel useful. He says he feels guilty and spoiled at home, eating, swimming, and playing games for months on end.

“They don’t get lunch there in the summer,” Thor explains. “They only get it in school.”

“It’s the same around here,” Loki shrugs, sailing his hand up and down on the breeze out the passenger window while he watches Thor’s hand work the gear shift. “Your being there won’t get them fed. And you’re not there for the fall harvest when the work gets even harder. The problem isn’t yours. You’ve only got three summers before college starts. You’ll be working year round soon enough. Quit pissing your free time away; you’re pissing mine away with it.”

“Sorry,” Thor says, frowning, and he gives Loki’s knee a firm squeeze in apology.

Loki watches with his head tipped back against the seat and turned toward his brother. The shadows of tree trunks send staccato flashes of sunlight across their skin as they sail down the country roads. It looks like they’re in a film, flickering along frame by frame. Thor seems not to notice. He only chews his lower lip while his forehead frowns.

“What now?” Loki sighs.

“I could bring lunch to kids out here.”

“And what will their parents think when a child provides for their children in a way that they can’t?”

“‘Yay, my kids are eating,’” Thor answers, glancing at Loki from the side of his eye.

“And what will the kids eat when you leave for college?” Loki asks, and Thor grimaces and gusts his breath out his nose fast enough that Loki can hear it over the wind and the crunch of the dirt road.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Thor asks.

“Sleep in, go swimming, play badminton-”

“That’s all pointless.”

“Everything’s pointless,” Loki laughs, reaching to remove a lock of hair that’s blown into Thor’s mouth. “So you might as well do pointless things that are pleasant.”

The last day of school is a Wednesday, and it’s a half day, so they’re home by eleven thirty and by twelve thirty all of their friends are over. They wear t-shirts and slather on sunblock every hour because they’ve frequently spent the first week of summer vacation recovering from the sunburns they acquired on the last day of school. They play three on three keep-away, which is a bit like water polo without nets, so the teams aim to maintain possession. Loki, Thor, and Sif are together against Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun. No one can be bothered to watch the time, so there is no score. No one plays fair: they climb on top of each other, push each other under, gang up on each other, wrestle, and occasionally climb out of the pool and run to the far end to avoid getting caught, resulting in foot chases and good-natured brawling.

Thursday passes in much the same way, though it gets a later start because they all sleep in until one in the afternoon, and after two hours of keep-away they switch to pitching basketballs at each other as they jump off the diving board, trying to catch the ball and throw it back before they go under.

At five o’clock on Friday morning, Odin and Frigga leave for a ten day vacation in Vancouver to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. They gave their sons the options of coming along or staying home alone. The boys chose the latter. They’re not allowed to have company at the house when their parents are away, but they didn’t want to spend ten days in close quarters with overly amorous parents, so they still feel like they've come out ahead.

Thor wakes up at eleven thirty, comes no closer to getting dressed than the glance he gives to his closet, and heads outside to rescue any frogs and toads that were sucked into the pool's filter overnight. Today there’s just one small toad, still breathing, and Thor walks through grass that’s damp in the shadows out to his mother’s farthest flower beds, saying “stay here and eat the mosquitoes” as he sets the tiny animal in the dirt beneath some daylilies. After that, Thor unwinds the hose from its hitch on the wall of the house and waters the beds and hanging baskets until the the latter are dripping a healthy stream onto the patio stones below them and spattering his shins with dingy water. He sees the short smooth blades that are all that remain of the crocuses; they’re notched and cropped where they’ve been nibbled by rabbits. The rosy petals have fallen from the tulips and the water beads up on the frosty skin of their leaves to trail down into the mulch. The daylily blossoms are coming up on their juicy stalks. When they bloom they’ll be nearly five feet tall. Loki outgrew them three years ago.

When Thor is done, he rinses the lawn clippings off of his feet and walks back into the quiet darkness of the house to crunch his cereal at the kitchen counter while he listens to the wind in the trees and the hum of the refrigerator.

It’s starting to get get warm and he wants to get in the pool, but has to wait for his brother to wake up, as they still aren’t allowed to swim alone. It’s not a rule they mind, as they both think it would be unbearably pathetic to drown in water they’ve been swimming in since before they could properly walk.

Loki doesn’t wake until one. He slides out of bed, stands up on his toes and groans through a stretch, then stares out the window to watch his brother, who is naked and following who-knows-what around the back yard with his phone, filming it.

“Are you wearing sunblock?” Loki shouts, and Thor startles, then looks back at the house and nods. “Good,” Loki says, at a whisper, and lets himself look out the window a bit longer at the broad back and heavy shoulders his brother has been growing.

Loki puts even less effort into dressing than Thor did; the household dress code is a rule they avail themselves of every opportunity to break. Odin requires that, at a minimum, shorts and a shirt be worn unless the boys are on their way to or from the pool or shower, or if they're in their own bedrooms. Nudity is the norm whenever Odin's away.

Loki enjoys the cool, smooth surface of the polished wooden seat against his ass while his bare legs swing through the air as he eats breakfast. Thor comes in while Loki is still slurping his cereal and Loki waggles the fingers of his left hand, asking for Thor’s phone, wanting to know what strange thing his brother was chasing around this time.

A dark brown butterfly with white trim on its wings.

“What is it?”

“Nymphalis antiopa,” Thor answers, then plugs his phone in to charge in case he finds something else to film later.

“Do you want to leave the house open, or turn on the AC?” Loki asks.

“Open. We can swim or hide in the basement if it gets hot. I want the breeze before it’s too cold to have the windows open all day.”

“Want to swim now?” Loki asks, and Thor nods.

They take turns spraying each other with sunblock, bobbing their heads in the light to make sure that no skin has been missed and they are evenly glistening. Then they peel yesterday’s t-shirts and trunks off of the backs of the patio chairs, shake the bugs out, and put them on to further shield themselves from the sun.

They play a lazy volleying game with a huge shiny beach ball that drums and squeaks as they bat it with wet palms.

When the sun starts to sink, the deer come out of the pines at the far end of the property to drink from the pond Thor put there for them so they’d stop crossing the street to go to the stream and getting hit by cars.

“Look how big the fawns are getting,” Loki breathes, with his lips at Thor’s left ear, as the brothers peer over the edge of the pool. Thor is lifting himself up to look by holding onto the diving board, scraping his fingers on the gravelly surface that keeps divers’ feet from slipping. Loki is clinging to Thor, with his legs folded up and clamped around Thor’s hips and his arms looped around Thor’s arms like the straps of a backpack. Thor hums and they keep staring until Loki’s stomach starts grumbling.

“We should eat,” Thor sighs, and Loki nods against him but doesn’t let go. “Hold your breath,” Thor says, and when he hears Loki comply, he lets go and they sink. They open their eyes and see the hazy flurry of bubbles floating up around them. Their hair moves the way jellyfish do, straightening as they advance, and collapsing in on itself when Thor reaches forward for the next stroke. When they get to the middle of the pool, Thor walks them to the stairs and up out of the water. Loki gets down and they drip across the patio, peeling off their soaked tees and trunks and plastering them to the furniture again before they scrub themselves dry and head inside. 

It takes over a minute for their eyes to adjust to the darkness of the house, and when they do everything is tinted green and the brothers look like they’re at the bottom of the sea; all the light coming in the windows has bounced off of grass and trees and carried their colors with it. Thor stares at Loki’s glowing green skin and doubly green eyes.

“‘They stood in dreams / Till Triton blew his horn,’” Thor says, and Loki squirms and grimaces and scratches his bottom. “Go take a shower and put a bunch of lotion on afterward,” Thor laughs. “You’re all dried out from the chlorine - that’s what’s making you itch.”

“Feels like bugs biting me everywhere.”

“What do you want for dinner?” Thor calls, as Loki heads toward the stairs.

“Pancakes.”

“‘Kay.”

“Blueberry?” Loki asks, and Thor turns to check the fridge, then nods.

Loki returns twenty minutes later, wrapped in his comforter and reeking of cocoa butter. He sits at the counter, sucking water from the ends of his curls and watching as Thor sets the table wearing their mother’s apron with nothing under it, his buttocks peeking out beneath the swaying loops of the bow as the muscles of his back flex against the weight of the cast iron skillet in his left hand.

“When’s the last time you had something to drink?” Thor sighs, seeing all the wet hair held in his brother’s mouth. Loki squints, wondering himself.

“At breakfast?” Loki tries, shaking his head and scattering the hair that was pressed between his lips. “If you count the milk in my cereal. Otherwise it was last night. I forget to drink when I’m in water all day.”

Thor nods and gets him a glass of milk. Loki’s fingers nearly disappear where they grip the glass. They always catch Thor’s eye. They’re not like his own. They’re smoother. More graceful. They look like the hands from old paintings that were meant to flatter rich people. The skin built up in translucent glazes that seem to shift and glow. An additive process. An accumulation of grace and precision. Loki is the only living being Thor has ever seen with hands that really look like that. He suspects the men and women who sat for those old oil portraits had thick clumsy stumps that had to be flattered and imagined into creamy tapered fingers.

The brothers’ bodies distract them all through dinner. Their noses and the tops of their cheeks, where the sunblock never stays put, are red and tender and have been so since Wednesday. The skin there feels like it’s smoldering slightly. It’s hot to the touch and the sight of it jars them every time they look at each other; it disturbs them to see each other injured, and it’s doubly unnerving to have been so wounded by a disembodied thing like daylight. The tile floor, which their flesh knows to be smooth, feels vicious against the soles of their feet and pads of their toes, which have been scraped raw by the concrete on the bottom of the pool and the gritty surface of the diving board. Their eyes have been burned pink by chlorine and by the sunlight that was mirrored up into them by the water. Their limbs feel heavy on land after so many days spent in the weightlessness of swimming. They feel foreign to themselves.

They’re foreign to each other, too. The brothers haven’t been so still and so exposed together since their parents went to Ireland last summer. They’re amazed by how much has changed. The traces of the boy Loki was are disappearing and Thor is worried that he’ll lose them further when he grows accustomed to this new larger Loki and overwrites the memories of the softer, littler one, replacing them with the wide shoulders and sharp jaw he sees beside him now. Loki looks at his new brother every summer and sees the gains Thor’s flesh has made. Sprinting toward manhood. Bones broadening and muscles swelling. Always taller and stronger and faster and more handsome. Hair longer and brighter, bleached over and over by the sun. 

Thor is watching his brother’s hands again when they reach to steal the last of his pancakes, eyes following the blood that courses through the veins that traverse the metacarpals.

“If they’d left us alone for two weeks when we were twelve and thirteen we would have had a party,” Loki says, with lips and teeth stained purple and Thor’s dinner still stuffing his left cheek.

“That’s why they didn’t leave us alone.”

“Mmm,” Loki agrees, and then leans back in his seat and sighs. “This is the only real vacation we’ll get. He’ll be after us in the evenings when they get back: ‘What did you do all day?’ ‘You’ve already seen that movie. Why are you watching it again?’ ‘Have you two turds even moved from that couch this month?’”

Thor laughs and then shakes his head and grins. Loki cocks his head and squints, seeing a secret gleaming in Thor’s eyes.

“Mom’s making him take her to London, Edinburgh, and the Hebrides,” Thor says, and Loki’s eyes go wide.

“Are you serious?”

“Yep.”

“Fuck, I love her,” Loki groans. “When?”

“Almost all of August.”

“Oh my god. Were we invited?”

“Yes. I thanked her, but said we didn’t want to go. She knew I would. He’s always happier when we’re not around. I like it when she gets to have him happy.”

“And when we don’t have to have him unhappy,” Loki adds, nodding.

Thor snorts and clears the table, then leaves to take a shower.

Loki puts on Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and takes the best spot on the living room sofa before Thor can put on some mopey movie and beat him to the middle of the couch.

Thor joins him fifteen minutes later, wearing his own comforter and covered in lotion that smells like oatmeal and almonds. Loki slumps until he’s propped up by Thor, then sleeps through the second half of the movie.

Loki wakes to rain at six in the morning and doesn’t remember how or when he got to bed. Thor tends to be able to coax him into walking without entirely waking him. Thor has also been known to carry him. He’s wearing black boxer briefs, white socks, and a faded green t-shirt, which means he felt cold when he got to his room last night. The dresser drawers are all completely closed when Loki looks, which means Thor dressed him - Loki always leaves the drawers at least half open after he’s finished fishing through them. The knits are all stretched out and rumpled from his restlessness in bed so that the shirt is showing most of his right collarbone and the socks have pooled at his ankles and are flopping around past his toes as he walks down the hall and into Thor’s bedroom.

Two heavy black X marks on the calendar on Thor’s wall catch Loki’s eye and he goes to see what his brother has been keeping track of: the days of their summer vacation, numbered in descending order from eighty-two to one. Today they’re on eighty. Loki doesn’t know why his brother wants the reminder. Knowing when the axe will fall does nothing to stop the blade, so why dwell on it? Better to be distracted. Forgetting a thing is often just as effective as actually getting rid of it. Loki sees the phone on his brother’s dresser, always ready with the hours and minutes; with the camera, so that Thor my capture spring, summer, fall, and winter and watch each one in its absence. Thor lost two summers of his life so that distant cousins could regain the difference. Always trying to defeat time. But time is space. To truly win you’d have to unmake the universe. Given the power to do so, Loki knows Thor would politely refuse.

Thor’s hands are resting on his breast and belly above the white sheet, and Loki watches them. They’re the sort of hands that are typically given to sculptures of warriors and kings. The kind Michelangelo gave to David - the ones he found in the marble with his hammer and chisel. A subtractive process. A loss. With Thor as its essence, set in stone over five hundred years ago.

Loki can’t see the rest of his brother’s body beneath the blankets, but he knows Thor is wearing nothing. Did not get cold last night and is not cold now. Will not be cold come winter. Always warm, as though his core shelters some lonely sun, come down to seek the company of kindred skin, cursing Thor with a star’s expectations of time.  

Loki pulls up the sheet and slides beneath it, out of the damp chill of the air and into the pocket of warmth made by Thor’s body. There’s a stiff patch on the sheets under Loki’s left hip. He shifts to scratch and pick at the the cotton, rolling the fabric between his fingers and scraping it with his nails until it’s soft again. He lets himself watch his brother sleep. Presses his mind to memorize the sight. He will have this Thor now on the inhale. This Thor now on the exhale. This motionless Thor who lives in the frightening pause between breaths that, for a split second, convinces Loki that his brother is dead every time it happens, though he tells himself that it is coming and that it will pass. Thor’s face is puffy with sleep and pillow-creased. His nose and cheeks are a bright, shiny pink and beginning to peel. When Loki reaches to touch his own face he feels the tacky shreds of scorched skin rolling up under the pads of his fingers. He takes a long breath, holds it, then lets it out as he nudges the side of Thor’s calf with the top of his right foot.

“It’s raining,” Loki says, hearing the thickness of sleep that’s still stuck in his throat because he hasn’t yet cleared it or spoken.

Thor hums and his face flexes slightly but his eyes don’t open.

“Been coming down for an hour at least,” Loki continues.

“I can smell it,” Thor sighs, then takes a deep breath and stretches with a groan. He opens red eyes and turns his head to look at Loki. “And hear it. It’s keeping the birds quiet. Robins didn’t wake me up at four and the cardinals didn’t start at six. Couldn’t you get back to sleep?”

“Didn’t try,” Loki shrugs.

“Is it coming in the windows?” Thor asks, beginning to look confused.

“No.”

Thor stares at his brother for a few seconds, squinting slightly, but not because he’s bothered by the light, as there isn’t enough to irritate him - everything is dim and grey.

“You don’t feel like sleeping, so I don’t get to sleep either,” Thor realizes, sounding irritated but smiling in spite of himself.

Loki grins and then curls forward so that the tip of his nose is against Thor’s shoulder.

“You’re freezing,” Thor huffs, and sits up to fetch the comforter from the foot of the bed.

Loki watches the long stretch of Thor’s spine, with all the bones and ribs showing as he reaches. He regrets that the cleft in Thor’s ass is lost so soon where it sinks into the mattress.

Thor tucks the blanket in behind Loki’s back and then flops down against the pillows again.

“If we went swimming now it would sound like we were in a bowl of Rice Krispies,” Loki says.

“And your teeth chattering,” Thor adds.

“Mmm,” Loki agrees, and props himself up on his arm, then leans over and picks the sleep from Thor’s eyes.

“Yours are just as bad,” Thor notes, wrinkling his nose and then wincing at the way it folds his sunburn.

“Yes, but I don’t have to look at them,” Loki says, and Thor buries Loki in pillows and blankets and climbs out of bed.  

Loki digs himself out just in time to see Thor’s erection bouncing out the door ahead of him and leading him down the hall.

Loki picks the sleep from his own eyes, touches his hair and immediately gives it up as the lost cause it always is, fixes the bedding so that the blankets are square, folds them back to invite Thor’s body in again, and listens. He hears the pipes running and the bathroom door opening in the hall and then holds his breath, waiting to see if Thor will come back to the bedroom or go downstairs to breakfast.

“What do you want to do all day?” Thor asks, coming back to the bed and slotting smoothly into the place Loki made for him.

Loki waits again. Thor does not fold the neatly arranged blankets back over his body. As much as Loki would like to keep looking at the water that splashed onto Thor’s chest and the last bit of baby-fat at the base of his brother’s belly, Thor seems more likely to leave the bed when he’s exposed like this, so Loki fingers the edge of the coverlet and flicks his wrist to fling the blankets over his brother.

“We’ll have to see what the weather does,” Loki says, settling further into the pillows and letting his eyelids go low and smooth. “Could sleep all day. You won’t have to do any watering with all the rain.”

Thor hums his agreement and stretches out on his back again, with his hands cupping his belly and his jaw slowly slackening.

“Why does she always ask you to do it?” Loki wonders.

“Do what?”

“The watering.”

“She doesn’t,” Thor says, opening his eyes and letting his head fall to the side to face Loki.

“What do you mean?”

“She never asks me,” Thor shrugs. “I guess it just goes without saying. Anyway, I’d see them wilting out there if I didn’t water them. All her work would be ruined in a week.”

Loki watches the rise and fall of Thor’s chest. He’s breathing a little faster now that he’s awake, but still slowly enough to retain that troubling pause. Loki watches the perfect round pinks of Thor’s nipples, lying warm and smooth against his breasts. There are a few very faint blond chest hairs between them that Loki likes to think of as his own -- as though his brother is a garden meant to give him all it grows.

“I’ve got one now,” Loki says.

“‘One’ what?”

“A chest hair. At first I thought an eyelash fell,” Loki admits, laughing, and the way Thor’s forehead folds up tells Loki that his brother’s smile is really a grimace.

Thor leans up on his elbow and tips Loki onto his back to get a better look, then frowns down at the lone hair curled at the center of Loki’s sternum.

“I like yours better,” Loki murmurs, fingering the ends of Thor’s rumpled blond waves where they’re swaying down and tickling his skin. “They look gold when the sun hits them.”

“They don’t do any good. They only mean we’re getting older.”

“Don’t you want to grow up?”

“Doesn’t matter what I want. It’s going to happen.”

When Thor lies back down on his side, Loki leans forward and kisses him, and Thor smiles his sweet wet smile, with its sharp teeth and its shut eyes.

“I love you too,” Thor says, smiling around the words.

“I know,” Loki answers, and leans in and does it again, but this time he carefully grabs Thor’s lower lip between his own and holds onto it as he pulls away. When the flesh pops free there’s still a thread of saliva strung between their lips. Thor briefly stops breathing. When he starts again he’s breathing faster and there is no more frightening stillness between his breaths.

“You could have anyone,” Thor whispers. “Someone better.”

Loki snorts and shakes his head.

“Who could be better?” Loki asks, eyes round and unblinking. “You’ll always have at least a fifteen year head start.” Thor’s lips fall open and stay that way. “Could anyone ever really love me more?” Loki murmurs, and he watches his brother’s chest expand beside him on the bed as Thor’s lungs fill to their fullest and pause for a beat before slowly deflating.

“No,” Thor whispers, sounding defeated.

“Your eyes are always on me. I can’t even remember a time when they weren’t.”

“I’ve always thought of you as mine,” Thor admits, dropping his eyes and shaking his head, then biting both lips between his teeth as if to sever them for what they’ve said -- or to stop anything else they might do.

The world has failed Thor: he lives on a planet with six billion people who don’t have the sense to love his brother more than he does.

Loki can’t stop grinning. His victory is absolute.

“So, then, nothing’s changing,” Loki offers, smiling.

Thor lifts his head to look Loki in the eye and Loki remembers that, until quite recently in human history, there was no word for blue, and that, without the word, man could not see the color. The sky was white. A lack. Blank. Empty. And he remembers that blue eyes, like the sky, have no pigment; we see them as blue due to the way their structure scatters light, but they are an absence.

“If that were true,” Thor says, “then you could go back to your bed right now. And you’d never need to kiss me again. And I’d never need to kiss you. And we could live the rest of our lives-”

“No,” Loki breathes, shaking his head in short fast jerks. “Thor, please, don’t make me-”

“Shhh,” Thor soothes, and tugs his brother in and tucks his tousled head beneath his chin, breathing through the frizzy riot of black curls and feeling his greedy heart slowing down under the influence of their scent. “I’m not,” Thor whispers. “I won’t.”

Loki gradually goes limp and Thor rubs his brother’s bony back through the soft rumpled jersey of his t-shirt while they listen to the rain out the windows and the quiet rustling of cloth.

“Why now?” Thor asks, after they’ve both grown calm and sleepy. For a moment he thinks his brother hasn’t heard, or won't say, or doesn't know.

“We’re older. It’s only... natural,” Loki says, frowning at the objection he knows the world would raise at his use of the word. “And you were gone the last two summers, so I couldn’t do it then.”

“Fuck,” Thor sighs, and the word shakes a bit on its way out. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. Now, anyway. I hated you for it then, though,” Loki admits, at a murmur. “Told myself I’d never forgive you for leaving me alone last summer. Knew I was lying. Forgot the second you got home. You had a blue t-shirt on. You gave me a hug, a kiss, and comb honey in a basswood box.”

Thor hums, and Loki lifts his head to set a squeaking pop of a kiss on Thor’s lips. Like the one he got from Thor from last summer. The sort Thor thought they had just left behind, believing there to be an impasse between before and after. Now he can’t think why he thought so. Loss has been such a constant companion he’s come to take it for granted. But this is like Loki’s painted hands: all the lower layers are still alive beneath the last one, and all are equally necessary to achieve the final effect. 

Loki’s eyes are on Thor, only inches away. Their green has deepened as it’s been compressed by pupils that have dilated with low light and high blood. Thor sees the sweep of lashes and the stretch of lid as Loki’s gaze drops down to his lips. Asking and telling. And Thor can only answer and obey, filling the roles that Loki has written for him. Neither brother can bring himself to close his eyes. It would be a forfeit and a betrayal. A loss and a lie. There’s nothing left for them to hide and no part of either one that the other doesn’t want.

Thor kisses him again, softer still, but longer, and Loki looks back up with eyes that are almost sleepy. His gaze stays calm, kiss after kiss, though their breath quickens and their hands clutch and press at each other’s backs. When they tip their heads to better fit their mouths together, they moan softly for each other to make up for the difficulty of maintaining eye contact at that angle.

“Seam?” Thor asks, sympathetic, after Loki winces and makes an unhappy sound.

Loki nods and rolls onto his back to slip off his boxer briefs, then sends them sailing across the room. His socks and t-shirt follow, all landing near the door with soft airy flapping sounds on the thick carpet.

“Better?” Thor asks, and Loki nods and curls up with the top of his head butting against Thor’s chest.

“It’s only eight,” Loki says. “The sun won’t be over the house for at least an hour and the clouds are still thick. We could swim before we have breakfast and we wouldn’t need sunblock.”

“I thought we agreed you’d get cold.”

“Yes, but I can take a hot shower afterward while you make breakfast.”

“And what do you want for breakfast?” Thor asks.

“Eggs. With bacon, if we’ve got it. Sausage if we don’t have bacon. Hash browns if we don’t have either.”

“All right,” Thor says, and Loki starts clambering over him rather than getting off on the other side and walking the five additional steps around the foot of the bed.

Thor flings his arm and snaps his wrist and lands a satisfyingly loud and perfectly centered slap on the right cheek of Loki’s ass. Loki shrieks and bolts out the door and into the bathroom. Thor looks out the window, hoping for rain-drenched deer, but the back field is empty so he heads downstairs to set out eggs and bacon for their breakfast and to text their mother to tell her they haven’t drowned.

In the pool, they float on their backs and listen to the sizzle of the rain with their ears under the water, then exhale and sink to the bottom to walk slowly across the floor of the pool. After that, Loki stands on Thor’s shoulders in the shallow end and has Thor jump up and launch him into the deep end, like a circus clown out of a cannon. When Loki’s shivering gets ridiculous, they head back inside.

At breakfast, Loki asks Thor to refill his orange juice and then he steals Thor’s bacon when Thor gets up to do it.

“Goddammit!” Thor laughs. “Fuck. And I can’t even be mad because I should have seen that coming.”

Loki nods in agreement and licks the grease from his smiling lips. He disappears while Thor does the dishes, but Thor finds him easily afterward: he’s back in Thor’s bed, stretched out in the middle of it, smiling and waiting and buried under all the blankets.

“Still cold?”

“It’s not even seventy outside,” Loki complains. “The water was warmer than the air.”

“You could put clothes on,” Thor says, and doesn’t quite keep a straight face.

Loki snorts and then shakes with laughter. He’s still quivering slightly when Thor climbs in beside him and fights his way under the covers.

“Time for a nap?” Thor asks. “You got us up awfully early.”

“If you go to sleep, you’ll wake up bald.”

“I won’t be the one looking at me,” Thor shrugs, then wiggles down into the pillows and closes his eyes.

Loki watches his brother’s face for a minute and a half before he kicks his right leg out to the side and knocks Thor’s knees. Thor laughs.

“I thought you’d last longer than that.”

“I’m going to cut off more than your hair in a minute.”

“I’m sure,” Thor agrees, and shifts with a long sideways arch that lands his front flush against Loki’s left side when he settles.

Loki lifts his head so that Thor can slide his arm under his neck and then goes back to watching Thor’s face and waiting.

What Thor finds in his brother’s features is not so much lust as expectation. No winking or raised eyebrows. No pout and no smirk. No licked or bitten lips. His green eyes are wide open and alert, lids and pupils alike. His features are smooth. His cheeks are faintly flushed. There’s only the slightest tension in the mouth, like a drawn bowstring waiting to be released. Nothing frantic or frightened. When Thor’s hand settles lightly over Loki’s throat and slowly glides down his breast, the sigh that parts Loki’s lips sounds like relief as much as a thrill. The breaths that fill the lungs beneath Thor’s fingers are drawn deeply not to prepare for the unexpected, but to provide adequately for something well known. Thor feels the scattering of hair at the base of his brother’s belly against the side of his pinkie as the pad of his thumb slots neatly into Loki’s navel. The muscles beneath his palm flex as Loki rolls his hips, tapping the backs of Thor’s knuckles with the top of his cock. Thor lifts his hand and reaches for it, curling his fingers low around the shaft and giving it a short, firm stroke. The way the thin, smooth skin feels blood-hot and sticky is familiar to Thor. It feels like his body has gone numb so that he may know himself without the interference normally caused by the input from his prick.

Loki lifts his hips again and glides within Thor’s fist. His neck strains to lift his head and his lips reach forward, asking for Thor’s mouth on them. Thor licks them and sucks them and rolls the lower one between his teeth while his fist squeezes Loki’s cock a little tighter and slides along the shaft faster with every pass.

Thor’s cock is caught between the base of his belly and the side of Loki’s hip and Thor is grinding it into his brother’s smooth skin almost absentmindedly while he watches Loki’s green eyes begin to stagger and fade, losing their grip on Thor’s own gaze. Thor remembers that green eyes are an illusion. Tiny deposits of the amber pigment melanin speckle an otherwise-colorless eye like his own and give a yellow cast to the blue light that’s being scattered out. So Loki’s eyes are actually gold. At this distance, Thor can see where the pigment is heavier in spots, hinting at the deception, and he’s pleased that he’s close enough to catch it.

And then the false green is traded for white with threads of red in it as Loki’s eyes roll back in his head and he keens, dappling the underside of the bed sheet with semen and then dribbling more down onto his stomach. When it trickles around onto Thor’s thumb, Thor drives his hips forward and groans, and Loki’s lower lip slips free from his teeth.

Loki is drifting toward sleep when he feels the wet, fuzzy warmth of Thor’s tongue painting his belly, clearing away sticky drops of come and leaving cool trails of saliva in their place. Loki scrapes his right hip with the edge of his hand and twists his wrist so that he can lick it clean before Thor gets to it. Thor’s semen tastes like pool water, meringue, and the salt of skin -- exactly as Loki’s own does. He hadn’t expected that.

Thor doesn’t listen to his body’s pleas for sleep -- his mind isn’t finished with his brother. He folds Loki up, spreads him open, and tips him over. He presses his face into every secret place to smell and taste the fur, wrinkles, curves, and folds. Runs stone-strong hands over all the fleshy soft spots, cupping the belly and the buttocks and the swell of each calf. He helps himself to everything. He licks the seam of Loki’s scrotum and the cleft of his ass. Tastes musk and metal when he laps at Loki’s hole and tastes seawater when he swipes at the sweat under Loki’s arms.

Loki is too pleased to do anything but breathe. He’s unconsciously following the advice given to those who get too close to grizzly bears: play dead. His nerves are humming with the low A at the end of the piano -- not as the key is struck, but after -- the sustained ring. He has his brother back. The best part of the Thor he lost two summers before has been resurrected. The relentless Thor -- the one who always reached and always won -- has made it back after their father threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Thor wakes at dusk, expecting to find Loki curled warm and soft in front of him, but the space is empty and the sheets are cold. Thor’s calendar is missing from the wall and his phone is gone from the nightstand. When he gets downstairs, he still doesn’t see Loki anywhere and he doesn’t get an answer when he calls his brother’s name. He runs out the back door and checks the pool in a panic. He’s so relieved to find it empty his eyes get wet. When he comes back in the house he hears a noise in the basement and starts down the stairs.

“Don’t come down here yet!” Loki shouts, and Thor nearly topples down the remainder of the steps.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Loki insists, nearly whining. “Go back upstairs and make us dinner and afterward I’ll show you your surprise.”

The rain has stopped, but it’s still cool, so Thor decides to do burgers on the grill - the heat from the coals will feel good and it will take a while in case Loki needs more time to work on his project.

Loki comes out while Thor is lighting the charcoal and asks if Thor knows there the blue painter’s tape is.

“In the garage, in a tub on the shelf next to the paint for the trim.”

Loki nods and flits off to the garage. Thor wonders if he’s going to be spending the next week undoing whatever it is his brother is getting up to in the basement.

When Loki does let Thor go downstairs, Thor is relieved to learn that no restorations will be required. Loki has taped heavy black trash bags over the small windows up at the tops of the walls. He’s put stacks of fresh towels in the bathroom. He’s pulled out the sofa-bed and made it up. Brought down snacks and drinks. And that’s all.

“No going upstairs until I say so,” Loki tells him, and Thor nods.

The springs on the sofa-bed squeak, but it’s worth it for their bounce. It’s like being on a padded trampoline. Thor likes the smell of basement that’s crept into the mattress and is puffing out through the weave of the sheets. Not mildew, but the scent of cool damp. It makes him feel younger. When the brothers were little and there were high winds or warnings for tornadoes at night, Frigga would put the boys to sleep in this bed to keep them safe. In the morning, the yard would be littered with leaves and branches and everything would smell of rain and green wood. And Thor and Loki would always be surprised by the mess, having slept soundly through storms that took down trees with wind and lightning.

It isn’t until they fall asleep and wake again that Thor understands what his brother has done. No phones. No laptops. No clocks. No daylight. They are not watching movies or reading books that might measure out the hours.

“Are you going to tell me what time it is?” Thor asks, and Loki shakes his head.

“There’s no time to tell,” Loki answers.

 

**Author's Note:**

> please don't comment or repost


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